103 Old Pine Hill Rd.
P.O. Box 838
Berwick, ME 03901
207-698-5737
LIBRARY HOURS
Tuesdays & Wednesdays: 9:30am to 7:30pm
Thursdays: 12:00pm to 7:30pm
Fridays: 9:30am to 5pm
Saturdays: 9:30am to 3pm
Chapter 9
You make your way to the library with The Blade of Berwickia in hand. Along the way, you notice a lot of familiar faces in The Kingdom of Knowledge. Beatrix of the Bog is there surrounded by fireflies, Fern has a friendly Jammin' Jungle parrot with her, the Captain is cuddling a newborn dragon, and Andromeda is befriending some mushrooms from the Beastly Bog. They’ve all come together to cheer you on as you deliver the blade to the library and restore peace and harmony to Berwickia.
However, as the blade is restored to its rightful case, the people of Berwickia learn an important lesson: It was never the blade that kept them in harmony, it was their harmony that kept the blade together. Reuniting all of the pieces was not enough to restore the blade. The people and creatures of Berwickia working together was the key!
Your adventures throughout the seven regions have helped reunite the creatures within, big and small. Thank you for being an important part of this adventure and helping to reforge the bonds of Berwickia!
The End
Epilogue:
A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Summer Reading
The library staff had a blast putting together this year's summer reading program, and we hope you had as much fun this summer as we did!
We had the opportunity to chat with lots of patrons and community members over the past few months about our program, and we found ourselves answering similar questions over and over again about how everything came together. With that in mind, we thought it would be fun to share a behind-the-scenes look at what went into putting together The Broken Blade of Berwickia, including the stories that inspired us (Rainbow Brite was involved), some of our early ideas we didn't end up using (staff member trading cards!), and our Circulation Specialist Sara's process for creating the Berwickia artwork (which includes using an actual map of Berwick).
Did you get this from a kit?
Our summer reading program takes a lot of work and a kit would certainly make things easier for us! For many years, most Maine libraries utilized the summer reading themes, programming ideas, and artwork from a company called Collaborative Summer Library Program (CSLP), but Maine switched to a different company called iREAD this past year.
For 2024, the iREAD theme was "Read, Renew, Repeat" and the CSLP theme was "Adventure Begins at Your Library".
While we did decide to do an adventure themed program this year, we've been creating our entire summer reading programs from scratch since our "Adventure Across America" program in 2021. That means we create a name, programing ideas, and all our own artwork every summer. No kits involved!
Artwork from the 2024 iREAD "Read, Renew, Repeat" program.
Artwork from the 2024 CSLP "Adventure Begins at Your Library" program.
The Shattered Sphere of Spectra - A First Draft Idea
Summer reading involves all our staff members, but planning begins in January with Shilo (Children's Librarian) and Alaina (Assistant Director) coming up with a theme, name, and general outline of the entire program.
The original idea Shilo and Alaina came up with was called The Shattered Sphere of Spectra and was heavily inspired by the movie Rainbow Brite and Star Stealer. In this version of our summer adventure, an evil wizard destroyed a magical sphere, unleashing darkness over the land of Spectra. Participants would gather spell components throughout their journey so they could defeat the wizard in an epic battle at the end of the summer and restore light to Spectra.
This idea received a unanimous thumbs down from the rest of the staff (who insisted Spectra was too similar to the company named Spectrum). So Shilo and Alaina went back to the drawing board, and The Broken Blade of Berwickia started to take shape (can you tell we all love alliteration at the library?).
The Inspiration
Inspired by The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Neverending Story, The Dark Crystal, and Raya and the Last Dragon, we knew we wanted our adventure to include a quest that would take participants throughout the land of Berwickia. We loved the idea of visiting a new region each week, meeting characters, and having side quests to complete before collecting each piece of the blade.
To make things even more fun, each staff member picked their favorite region and took charge of creating that week's storyline, Berwickia character, and the "gift" (stickers) participants received for completing a side quest. Sara chose the Dazzling Desert, Shilo picked the Beastly Bog, Emma (Circulation Manager) chose the Whispering Woods, Alaina's region was Captain's Cove, Gina (Circulation Specialist) picked the Perilous Peak and Treacherous Tunnels, and Sharon (Library Director) chose the Fairy Ring Forest. Emma, Shilo, and Alaina collaborated on the remaining regions.
We had a lot of different inspirations for the various regions, from Jumanji, to Mt. Everest, to Choose Your Own Adventure books. Here are a few highlights:
And that side quest where you have to gather the correct potion ingredients for Beatrix? That was inspired by a (really infuriating) puzzle from the Nancy Drew and the Secret of Shadow Ranch video game that involves using a guide to identify which vegetables in the garden are ripe and ready to be picked.
The Beastly Bog - Our main inspirations for the Beastly Bog were the Swamps of Sadness from The Neverending Story and the Bog of Eternal Stench from Labyrinth. The Bog of Eternal Stench was so prominent in our minds while we were planning out the summer that it led to us inviting The Poop Museum to visit during the bog week of our program!
Shilo created the character of Beatrix the Bog and was influenced by the graphic novels Garlic and the Vampire and Garlic and the Witch.
The Whispering Woods - Emma came up with the Whispering Woods characters and storyline, and she took inspiration from the foggy and mysterious Lost Woods from The Legend of Zelda video game series. During the early stages of planning, Shilo and Alaina had thought about calling this region either the Wicked Woods or the Wandering Woods.
The original idea for this week had been to include some sort of attack that would leave our hero (that's you!) injured, forcing participants into a choose-your-own-adventure scenario in the next region as they had to pick a path that would be easy to navigate and could lead them towards help.
Captain's Cove - Alaina is obsessed with the show Our Flag Means Death and was determined to not only have a week of summer reading themed around pirates, but to dress up like a pirate at every opportunity, as well. As an Easter Egg, Sara used a screenshot from the show (featuring the pirate ship Revenge) when she created the images for the pirate-themed craft during the Captain's Cove week of summer reading.
Captain's Cove was a tough area for us to name - some early ideas included Barnacle Bay and The Stormy Sea. In a first draft idea, Captain's Cove was called The Slumbering Sea and the storyline that week featured a sleeping spell that impacted Captain Trench and their pirate crew. The side quest for this week would have involved the hero finding a way to break the spell (possibly with some mermaid help) and getting a lift aboard Captain's Trench's ship to the next region of Berwickia. When we came up with the Jammin' Jungle side quest, which involved breaking a musical spell, we decided to go in a different direction with our pirate part of the story.
The Dazzling Desert - Were you curious about the name of your first Berwickia companion, Ġenmēow?
To come up with a name for Gen, Sara was inspired by J.R.R. Tolkein, who used Old English to create character and place names.
The name stems from the word gecnawan, which means "to recognize, perceive, or understand". Using a variation of this word, ġecnēow, Sara changed a few letters and came up with Ġenmēow.
The Art
All of the art for our summer reading program is created by our staff member Sara. Shilo and Alaina create a list of of ideas and then Sara brings them all to life! The first thing Sara created for this year's program was the map of Berwickia.
Believe it our not, Berwickia really is Berwick.
Sara included this turtle on the Berwickia map long before Gina created the character of Terry the Terrible. It's actually a tribute to Morla the Ancient One from The Neverending Story!
Lastly, we knew we wanted participants to receive something physical each week to mark their progress through Berwickia. Our first idea was to create trading cards featuring the staff members portraying the various Berwickia characters, such as Beatrix of the Bog (Shilo), Fern the elf (Emma), Captain Mary Ana Trench (Alaina), and Andromeda the mage (Sharon). Participants would need to collect a full set of trading cards before being able to complete their quest and re-forge the Blade of Berwickia.
We didn't have enough time (or costumes) to bring this idea to life, so we came up with a collection of stickers instead.
Check out the first draft of stickers that Sara created.
Some of them ended up staying similar to their final draft form (like the Conductor's wand), but others were completely
re-imagined (like Alice the Apologetic Snow Monster).
Original Alice design
Final version of Alice
We hope you had as much fun participating in our interactive adventure as we did creating it! We're already brainstorming ideas for next summer. What do you think our theme will be?